5/17/2010 @ 6:00PM

YouTube's Money Question

YouTube is five-years-old this month, and as part of its birthday celebrations, owner
Google
is releasing an entire reel of YouTube trivia. The only thing missing is the one thing about the video-sharing site that everyone wants to know: Is it profitable?

YouTube, says
Google
, is the world’s third-busiest website, getting 2 billion views a day, 70% of which are from outside the U.S. Every minute, 24 hours of new video is uploaded by YouTube users; if you wanted to watch everything ever put on the site, you would need to clear out your calendar for the next 1,700 years.

Which is along the lines of what most people would guess. Google, though, wasn’t at all forthcoming about whether YouTube makes any money, or whether the operation will ever earn back the $1.65 billion that Google spent on it in 2006.

Doubts have been raised about YouTube’s profitability for two reasons: the enormous expense of hosting and then streaming all of that video, along with the fact that advertising revenues for all websites have, in recent years, dropped to a fraction of what they were at the time of Google’s acquisition. Some Wall Street analysts, in fact, have maintained that YouTube has been, and will forever remain, a money-loser.

You can post a video about your thoughts on the matter on your YouTube channel. Just don’t expect a reply video from Google.